Squashed Philosophers is one of those fantastic sites that I assume everybody already knows about – but some of you probably don’t. If that’s you, go and have a look – they are really well-done abridged versions of books of philosophy that I’d never get past chapter 2 of if I read them in full.

Anyway, he’s expanded his sights a bit, and done the Epic of Gilgamesh in 4,500 words. He makes it incredibly wonderful. Here’s the beginning:

Of He who has seen all things, I will make known. Of the One who has done all things, I will tell. Anu-of-the-Sky granted him knowledge. He saw the Secrets, discovered the Hidden, and brought knowledge of time before the Flood. He returned to us from afar, and carved on stone the tale of his toils. He built walls for Uruk-Haven. See the walls of true-fired brick- did not the Seven Sages lay out its plan? One league for a city, one league for gardens, one league for courts of stone. Find the copper tablet box, loose its lock of bronze, take the tablet of lapis lazuli, and read-

…and it goes on like that for a while. There aren’t many times I’ve read a translation of something this old, and had the prose style make me want to go on.

The other half of the attraction comes from the characters. They feel like very obvious archetypes, somehow. I’ve no doubt that the Golden Bough would map out all the parallels with any other culture you care to mention, but I’m thinking of a more general, intuitive feeling of ‘I know you’.

There’s the added attraction that it’s nigh impossible to read Gilgamesh without thinking of it as slash-fodder, and the Enkidu/Gilgamesh pairing seems even more wrong-right than God and Satan. Admittedly, I’ve only found a few bits of it in the wild, but it’s the idea that counts. In the wrong/right contest, though, the clear winner is this Hal Duncan person, who is writing a novel about “Gilgamesh and the Furries” – I adore the psychedelic bonkersness of that idea.

I know it’s petty and silly, but the news of Dick Cheney shooting a pensioner has had me giggling plenty. Added bonus is that the White House has decided to blame the guy he shot.

Worldchanging recently pointed out that underground coal fires release as much Carbon Dioxide as US road vehicles. Like (it seems) a lot of the other readers, I was surprised, keen to find out more, and interested in what solutions people had come up with.

There aren’t any. Or at least, none that I can find. I spent a fair while in the British Library last week, looking through the few references I could find. There’s some work on using satellites to identify and monitor fires – Anupma Prakash, for example, has written quite a few articles on this, and there is a small organisation investigating coal fires in China. And there are the old techniques that have been used for decades (centuries?) with limited success. The book Unseen Danger, which is a history of the Centralia mine fire, is a readable account of some of these, and how they failed.

It seems that much of the research is tucked away in technical papers within mining-related organisations. I kept on seeing references to reports from the US Bureau of Mining. But that bureau was closed a decade ago, their reports are presumably locked away in a library in Washington, and the best we have online ins the Mine Safety and Health Administration.

As Prakash says, “till recently, such a major environmental hazard was overlooked or largely undermined by the international community”. I’m not sure where to look for ways of changing that, but I do think it’s worth doing.

I’m in dire need of some dancing tonight. I’ve been immobile for almost a fortnight now, and I’ve got to the point where my limbs are jiggling about by themselves.

Any suggestions? Not too bothered about type of music or whether anyone I know is there (as the goths among you know, I dance to anything and don’t talk much in clubs anyway), which I guess means open to anything in cambridge.

My choices seem to be a Led Zepplin cover band at the Junction (I think somebody on my friends list said they were going, but I have no idea who), two acoustic things (would be nice, but probably not much of a knees-up), or folk at the portland arms (but the portland is too small a place to go to alone).

Relatedly:

• public service announcement for cufs people: one of those acoustic events is in Clowns, so presumably the venue for this evening will be changing
• George Galloway is speaking in Cambridge this evening. Must control the urge to throw eggs!
• We’re all neighbours is a pretty useful listings site, for those of us outside the university and so not seeing event posters at every turn.

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Seems like someone Up There is trying to balance out the tiredness of my friends by not letting me catch any sleep at all. ho-hum. Well, tonight is going to be interesting if I’ve not managed to get a kip before then.

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My glasses should have an alarm to tell me when they’re covered in dirt. Because currently I just get a headache and spend half an hour wondering what caused it before I think to take the glasses off and wipe them.

And no, I don’t have anything more dramatic to worry about right now. Feels good, that.

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